Linking to usernames on fanfiction,net

[xwingace]

Title:
Linking to usernames on fanfiction,net

Area:
entries/comments

Summary:
Make &l;tuser name="username" site="www.whatever.net"> work for fanfiction.net

Description:
It's a small and very frivolous suggestion, but what the hey.

Fanfiction.net is a fairly large community out there, if not quite so social as a journalling site or Twitter, and I'm sure quite a few of us alse have accounts there. And the usericon works for Archive of our Own, so why not for ff.net?

You can link to a fanfiction.net user profile with http://www.fanfiction.net/~username
This breaks if someone changes their username, but works just fine until then.

Thank you in advance,

XWA

Poll #7082 Linking to usernames on fanfiction,net

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 66

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
39 (59.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (1.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (4.5%)

(I have no opinion)
23 (34.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[arethinn]

It would be neat, but I'm not sure the alias-format of the FFN user link (the business with the ~ in it) really conforms to the http://www.site.com/username format I thought it needed to have for this to work... the real permanent links are pretty ugly (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1349710/).

[denise]

The only thing that needs to be site.com/users/username are the sites we don't have a defined module for -- if we have the URL structure, and it can be reasonably extrapolated (like, given a user "username", the URL for their profile/page/whatever is always the same, and always can be constructed just from knowing the username) we can make it work in specific. (The specific modules overrule the generic module!)

I don't know enough about FFN usernames, etc, to say, though: does anyone know what the URL structure is? Like, again, given the user "username", what would things look like? Also, what should the userhead ("profile") and username ("journal") link to?

[arethinn]

The FFN link I supplied is a user profile page (mine).

http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1349710/ = http://www.fanfiction.net/~shyfoxling

I believe that the permanent id number is assigned sequentially on account creation. It's not constructed from the display name, which is just an alias and can be changed at any time.

Also, what should the userhead ("profile") and username ("journal") link to?

Hmm, hard to say. There isn't a separate profile-only page as there is on AO3. I think they'd both just have to link to the user page (which contains both bio and story list), which may not be quite ideal :-/

[xwingace]

There is a bit of a complication I hadn't realised when I made the suggestion, which is that ff.net allows usernames with spaces as well as underscores and hyphens. These get stripped out for the URL alias, though. The alias is also case-insensitive.

So the link to the profile of users username, UserName, User Name, User_Name and User-Name (this one appears to exist -- no harm intended) would all look like:
http://www.fanfiction.net/~username

And as Arethinn says; there's mostly only a link to a writer's profile/user page.

[cesy]

So could those all be different users, or would they all be different names for one user? What would happen if you actually went to ff.net/~username - which user's page would you see?

[xwingace]

User-name appears to exist, or at least that's where I end up when I follow the link (the one I gave). Using the site search, however, I can't find this username, nor can I find any authors with any of the 'username' user names.

I'm guessing Fanfiction.net (which is the site I'm talking about; ff.net is a common abbreviation, but that is actually a different site altogether)has some sort of mechanism in place to prevent duplication. But I don't actually know that for sure.

XWA